Features of Rumor Spreading on WeChat Moments

Abstract

WeChat is a mobile social media software launched by Tencent in 2011 that has 600 million monthly active users in August 2015. It is used in over 200 countries and regions with more than 20 different language versions. WeChat Moments (WM), viewed as a kind of realization of its social networking, provides users a way to post, view and share links of web pages in HTML5. The rumor spreading on WM, apart from the traditional traits of rumor spreading, gets its new spatiotemporal features. For better management and control of rumor spreading on WM, study for more knowledge about its properties is required. In this paper, 10 WM pages are used to analyze the properties, which contains approximately 6.5 million page views records. With the analysis of overall diffusion temporal characteristics, we propose a rumor spreading lifecycle with three different phases, i.e., the development phase, the explosion phase and the decline phase. By analyzing the diffusion region in different time, it is found that the rumor spreading regions in different time experience little change from the very beginning, and the cities in most frequently observed provinces like Guangdong are extracted for further analysis. It is concluded that the rumor spreading region has a positive correlation with its population and GDP. Moreover, the spatial and temporal characteristics of different spreading levels are studied, which leads to the conclusion that for most users only two steps are required to get access to the rumor that interests them on WM.